Daisy Bell
by December21st
Summary: Some hunts are all sunshine and daisies. That doesn't make them any less dangerous.
1. Part 1 of 2

"Daisy Bell"

(Part 1 of 2)

By December

Fandom: Supernatural

Rating: PG

Pairing: None

Warnings: A little swearing.

Summary: Some hunts are all sunshine and daisies. That doesn't make them any less dangerous.

Sam lays there with daisy petals the color of sunshine drifting down from a sky painted ten shades of blue. The smell of grass, earthy and tangy, drifts in the warm summer air. There's another smell underneath, one that he knows too well, but he tries not to notice it.

"Wake up," a voice whispers. Sam sits up and the little girl that has been showering him with daisy petals giggles, hands him a daisy, and runs off. She's no more than three years old.

He's in a field of daisies near an old dilapidated barn. It's the barn he and Dean were searching earlier today. They didn't find anything. Tom Carrow said he saw a little girl run in there once, but the child was gone when he tried to follow. Maybe it's the same girl.

He's not alone in the field. There's a crowd of women and girls, all ages, milling around. None of them get too close to him until a fifty-something woman in a waitress' uniform and a nametag proclaiming her name to be "Daisy" approaches him.

"We were planted alive, so that we might grow," she tells him sadly. All the women are watching him now. It's eerie.

Someone whispers "wake up" again, so he does. Sam takes a moment to get his bearings – there are cascades of blue-and-white flowers decorating the walls, bedspread, and pretty much everywhere else. He liked the forty-year-old faux wood paneling in the last motel better.

Outside his window is the barn he was just dreaming about. Although, come to think of it, there weren't any daisies in that field yesterday. It's October, not exactly the right season for daisies in Connecticut. But when Sam raises his hands to run them through sleep-touseled hair, he stops cold. He's still holding the daisy the little girl gave him.

It takes him three steps to get to Dean's door across the hall. For someone that usually wakes reluctantly, eternally fighting for another ten more minutes of sleep, Dean answers the door in five seconds flat, gun in hand.

Tom and Elena Carrow never mentioned anything about strange dreams, floral or otherwise. They bought this farmhouse half a year ago and converted it into a B&B for the weekend antiquers to stay at, but someone keeps scaring off their guests. Or something.

When the brothers enter the kitchen a little later, Tom's channel surfing as he eats breakfast. He flits past the end of "2001", where HAL is singing, an ad for some TV show about a pie maker, a Donald Duck cartoon, an old Blondie movie where Dagwood's chasing their dog, and finally settles on a "Dukes of Hazzard" rerun.

Dean frowns at the television but doesn't say anything. Nobody else noticed.

Elena Carrow makes a spinach-mushroom omlette to die for. Over breakfast, the Carrows tell them that it hasn't been a working farm for years, the farmland long since sold. When the previous owners, an older couple, passed away with no heirs, the farmhouse was taken over by the state. The Carrows bought it at auction.

Sam goes out to the field behind the barn after breakfast. It's an unkempt tumble of ankle-deep mud and tangled grass and weeds. There's not a flower in sight.

The Winchester boys spend the day in town doing research. Dean befriends Mrs. Abigail McGreevy of the town's token historical society while Sam trudges through microfiches of the town's weekly newspaper.

By the end of the day they know that the former owners were Jonathan and Emily Parker, both in their 80's when they died of pneumonia (Emily) and, six months later, malnutrition (Jonathan). They'd both died in the county hospital, and had both been cremated. The Parkers had been generally considered pleasant but reclusive.

There is nothing in the town's history to suggest restless spirits or any other kind of malevolent entity roaming the area.

"Now what?" Dean wonders as they drive back to the farmhouse. The EMF readings in the barn are strong enough to suggest ghosts and not something else, but they need the next piece of the puzzle.

Sam sighed. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Dean grinned "Yeah, Brain, but where are we going to get two tons of banana pudding and a giant tricycle?"

Sam just stares at his brother, blinking, while Dean continues to grin.

"Aw, c'mon, Sammy. Pinky and the Brain? There are these two mice ..." he trails off as Sam shakes his head in resignation. "You missed out on a real classic."

"So about our next step..."

"I'll get the shovels while you explain to the Carrows why we're digging up their back yard."

It takes them less than an hour, digging in the spot where Sam remembers lying in his dream, to find the skeleton. Sam finds the remains of a purse in the grave. Assuming the purse belongs to the body, she's Daisy Anderson, forty-five years old the last time she renewed her Virginia driver's license -- in 1972.

Dean wants to salt and burn the body where it lies, but Sam convinces him that they really need to call the cops. She could have family needing closure.

Dean finally concedes. Tom Carrow gives the police a story about digging holes to plant some trees, and the cops tape off the grave and take Daisy Anderson away.

Tom and Elena are pleased as punch that it's over so soon, but Sam and Dean aren't convinced. It doesn't feel like it's over.

The next time he sees it, Sam recognizes the field of daisies from his dream. The sky is brilliant blue. He can see the women on the edge of his vision from where he's lying in the grass. They're dropping daisies into his grave one at a time, like mourners at a funeral. He's covered in daisies, except it's just dirt now. Dirt covering him and getting in his nose and mouth and he's gasping for breath when he wakes up. And spits out a mouthful of dirt.

This is not good.

The brothers decide that they need to do a thorough search of the house. They start in the basement because, as Dean explains to the Carrows, "more nasty shit has happened in basements than anyplace else added together."

They search through sixty year's worth of farm implements, canning supplies (what few canned goods they find have long since gone bad), mousetraps with tiny mouse skeletons, a wood carving set, old cans of now-dry paint, every National Geographic ever printed (up to a year ago), a treadle sewing machine, a coal bin for the old furnace empty even of coal, something that might have been a vacuum cleaner, a surprisingly well-organized collection of nails, screws, nuts and bolts, and plenty more semi-identifiable miscellanea.

Tom says they already sold, recycled, or just plain threw out about half again as much junk. He's been gradually working his way through the basement, replacing the Parkers' junk with their own.

The one thing they don't find is any hint of who or what is haunting the farmhouse.

The attic is much the same as the cellar, only more dusty. Elena wants to make it into a sunroom someday, if they can stay in business. Still no suggestions of what's going on.

Dean searches the second floor while Sam does the same to the first floor. It's fortunate for them that there are no other guests. Guest rooms and public areas, all freshly rennovated, and the Carrows' own rooms; all are carefully searched by the Winchester brothers. All with equally sparse results.

By the time they're done, it's nearly dinnertime. Dean is splayed out on the couch of the living room while Sam futzes with his laptop.

"I don't get it. We've dealt with restless spirits before. We found this Daisy Anderson chick's corpse like she wanted. So what are we missing?" Dean complains.

Sam looks up from his computer. "Daisy Anderson went missing from Roanoke, Virginia on October 12, 1973. Dean, that's nearly 600 miles from here. Why would she be buried here?"

"I've got another one for you. What's above this room?" Dean points at the ceiling directly above his head, not bothering to move. The expression on his face is quizzical.

"Uh, your room?" Sam suggests, sketching quick floor plans in his head.

"Nope, the window's by the wall right about there." Dean gestures a line at the ceiling above his feet.

"The one with all the begonias?"

"No, that one stops even with the stairs." Dean waves an arm over his head, in the general direction of the stairs on the other side of the wall, still not moving from the couch.

"But they're next to each other," Sam's more asking than informing, and he's already starting to get out of his chair.

"Wanna bet?"


	2. Part 2 of 2

"Daisy Bell"

(Part 2 of 2)

By December

Fandom: Supernatural

Rating: PG

Pairing: None.

Warnings: A little swearing.

Summary: Some hunts are all sunshine and daisies. That doesn't make them any less dangerous.

Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Thonk. Thonk. Thonk.

"Hey, Dean, I got it," Sam calls from the room with all the begonias. He's shifted a decorative vanity away from the wall and by the time Dean comes in, he's already worked out where, under wallpaper and thin plaster, the edges of a long-disused door are. The brothers exchange glances as Dean pulls out a knife and plunges it into the seam between the door and the wall.

"It was ugly wallpaper anyhow," he comments as he moves the knife down through the yellow-and-pink begonia wallpaper and the plaster underneath it. Sam's pulled out a knife of his own and is doing the same to the top of the door. Once the brothers have breached enough of the door's seal, the rest is easy, requiring a coordinated application of pressure -- in other words, they kick the door in.

It's a child's room. Not an infant's; the trappings are those of an elementary school-aged girl. Everything is covered in a thick layer of dust, and cobwebs decorate every nook and cranny. The light from the setting sun filters in through dingy gauze curtains. There's a junior-sized bed boasting a headboard with beautifully carved daisies, a matching dresser that's waist-high on Sam, and a narrow bookcase with an assortment of a young girl's books, dolls and other toys. On one of the upper shelves, there's an old framed photo of a respectable-looking couple in their thirties and a grinning, gap-toothed girl about six.

Sam picks up a dust-encrusted notebook from one of the shelves and starts reading through it. Dean searches through the dresser, clothes that were once soothing pastels and cheery floral prints now dismal gray and moth-eaten, some falling apart in his hands, stirring up clouds of dust.

"Dean, listen to this," Sam tells his brother, reading from the notebook. "The Princess Garden. By Daisy Parker, Age 8"

"The Parkers had a kid? Why didn't we know about this?"

"She could've been born here on the farm. They were considered reclusive, maybe they just didn't report it."

"Yeah, that's completely normal."

"Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess named Bellis Perennis." Dean arches an eyebrow at the name but doesn't say anything. "She lived in a huge castle with her mom and dad who loved her very much and were her only friends because the castle wasn't close to town. One day she planted a flower in her garden. The flower grew under ground for a whole year and exactly one year later it bloomed and it was pretty and it was her friend. But the flower was lonely under the ground so the princess planted another flower. And the next year both the flowers bloomed and they were even bigger and prettier. So every year on that day the princess had a big party with her flower friends. And everybody lived happily ever after. The End."

"Okay, so what? You think this Daisy Parker believed her own story and when she grew up she killed Daisy Anderson so she would have a friend? Another 'flower' like her?" Dean wonders, speculating idly.

"It makes a twisted kind of sense," Sam agrees, continuing to look around the room. He nods towards a calendar on the wall. It's a calendar from a seed company, with a drawing of a seed packet for common daisies displayed against a backdrop of a field of daisies. The calendar is displaying October 1954, with each day through the twelfth carefully crossed off in green crayon. "That's tomorrow. October thirteenth."

Dean carefully takes the calendar off the wall and flips through it. There's nothing else noteworthy there, unless the different colors of crayon used to mark off the days in earlier months counts. He notes that May (marigolds) has orange x's and January (snapdragons) had its days counted down in purple. The other months are similar. Dean turns the calendar back to October, returning it to its home on the wall, when he notices something.

"Here's our princess," he tells Sam, pointing at the drawing of the seed packet. In small letters, under the label "Common Daisy" is the technical term for the flower: bellis perennis.

"So Daisy thought of herself as a princess. Doesn't every little girl that age?"

"Dude, how would I know?"

"Why do you think they kept her room like this? She'd be … over sixty by now."

"Maybe the Parkers kept their Daisy hidden from the townsfolk because she was a little ... backward. You know, she never grew up … up here." Dean taps himself on the forehead.

"What if the Parkers can't bear to see their little girl institutionalized. So they keep her here. And then one day when she's …" Sam pauses, quickly calculating ages and years, "… about twenty-five she runs off and ... then what? Meets Daisy Anderson, kills her because they have the same name and buries her in her parents' back yard? So she'll have a friend?"

"Sure, why not? It fits the facts we have."

"So why didn't the haunting stop when we found Daisy Anderson?"

"Maybe we still need to salt and burn her."

"I guess."

"What do you want, Sam? Another notebook with the story 'How I killed Daisy Anderson'? With pictures, maybe?"

"What do you think happened to her? To Daisy Parker?"

"Maybe she retired to Florida. Dude, again, how would I know?"

Sam just shakes his head, clearly dissatisfied with their theory. They finish searching the room and head downstairs to let the Carrows know what they've found.

The Carrows have plans to drive to Hartford tonight after dinner. They're staying with Tom's sister and won't be back until tomorrow afternoon. It's just fine with the Winchesters; they prefer to work without civilians getting underfoot.

It's too late tonight for the brothers go into town and ask questions about where Daisy Anderson's body is being kept, so Sam and Dean spend some time lying to people on the phone and end up with an appointment to see the assistant coroner tomorrow morning. Sam's tired after the dreams he's been having so he calls it an early night.

Sam's getting used to regaining his awareness -- he can't very well call it waking up -- in the field behind the Parker's old barn. The sky's a tumble of gathering gray storm clouds and the field looks more or less like it does when he's awake. He recognizes the child playing quietly in the hayloft as Daisy Parker although she's a couple years older than she was in her photo. Wisps of hay tumble to the ground twenty feet below, where a handful of chickens are clucking peacefully, scattered among an assortment of lumber, and a spool of bailing wire, and a half-assembled picket fence, a can of white paint standing ready nearby.

A flash of lightning in the distance and the subsequent peal of thunder startles him more than it does her, but it startles one of the chickens in the barn with her even more, squawking and flying in her face. She starts and jerks back, tumbling out of the hayloft. Sam instinctively reaches out to catch her, even though he knows it's a dream and he's seeing events that unfolded more than half a century ago. The fall itself might not be automatically have been fatal, but she lands on the pickets of the half-finished fence. Sam winces at the image of blood dripping down the row of wooden pickets, staining the boards red.

Another flash of lightning and suddenly the body is gone. The fence is still there, covered in blood, so it hasn't been long. Sam sees the Parkers in the field, at the base of an old apple tree, filling in a grave. They're both sobbing. They finish and Jonathan Parker pulls out the notebook, the one with the story about the princess. He nods at the grave, and he and his wife both touch the notebook reverently. Sam's heart breaks for them.

There's music blaring in Dean's ear, jarring him out of a sound sleep. It's not even the kind of music he usually listens to; this music sounds old and scratchy, like it's an old record and not a clock radio. A man with a friendly voice is singing:

Daisy, Daisy

Give me your answer do.

I'm half crazy

All for the love of you.

Dean sits up, shocked into instant wakefulness, and slams the alarm clock off with enough force to knock it back into the heavy brass bedside lamp. He glares at it and sees that it's exactly midnight. He checks the clocks' settings and it's still set to go off at seven. There's no way it should have gone off now. Considering the events of the last two nights, he decides to check to make sure that Sam hasn't decided to take up sleep flower arranging. He takes a moment to hastily dress and pads softly across the hall, tapping quietly at Sam's door, getting no response before opening the door and peering inside.

Sam's gone.

The blue floral bedding is rumpled but not thrown back; a quick touch tells Dean that the pillow is still warm. Sam's duffle bag is still on the rickety little luggage stand; his shoes are neatly stashed under an uncomfortable-looking chair decorated with big blue flowers. And, most importantly, Sam's gun is still in the drawer of his carefully whitewashed wicker nightstand. Wherever Sam is, he's barefoot and unarmed.

A flicker of movement in the doorway draws Dean's attention, but it's not Sam. It's a little girl, or someone that was once a little girl. Her once brightly colored dress, a cheery collection of flowers, is now shades of gray, like she's been somehow transferred to old black-and-white film stock. Her face, equally colorless, flickers briefly, reinforcing that impression.

She crooks a finger at him, beckoning him in a way that sends a shiver up his spine. Any other time and he'd think twice about following a ghost, but he glances at Sam's unkempt, still empty bed, steels himself, and follows the dead child down the stairs and outside into the night.

Sam half expects to wake up now. He knows Daisy Parker's story. But the dream continues. It's doesn't feel like a story anymore, though, it's a quick montage of images rushing at him in a jumble, like several people talking at once. One or both of the Parkers are in all the images, their ages changing, never younger than they were when their daughter died. Sitting in their dining room going through newspapers from various northeastern cities. Approaching women that they've selected. Sometimes in an empty parking lot, sometimes faking car trouble, sometimes breaking into a house. Sometimes they have a gun, sometimes chloroform, sometimes a glass of water is drugged. The women are all ages. The oldest looks ninety. The youngest is the three year old girl that gave him the daisy. Then Sam sees what the Parkers were looking for in the newspaper; what they circle in newspaper announcements of weddings, graduations and anniversaries. In human interest stories and cast lists of local plays. Anything listing people's names. Because that's what the Parkers wanted. Women named Daisy.

The long-dead girl with disconcerting dark stains on the back of her dress leads Dean into the old field behind the barn; the field that Sam's been dreaming about. It's cold and muddy and he doesn't care. The underage spirit is waiting for him in a spot about forty feet from where the plastic police ribbon guarding Daisy Anderson's former grave is fluttering in the breeze. She's just standing there, looking at him with her dead gray eyes.

"What? Why did you bring me out here? Where's Sam?" Dean shouts at her. In between one blink and the next, she's just not there anymore, but she left something in her place to mark where she was standing. It's a shovel.

Sam continues to dream, even though he's trying to wake up as hard as he can. At first he thinks that he's dreaming of Jonathan and Emily Parker burying their daughter again, but he soon realizes that he's still dreaming in the rapid-fire montage of images going by so fast he can barely make out what's going on. The Parkers are burying their victims. The Parkers are burying women named Daisy. Sam rapidly loses count of how many bodies he sees carefully placed in the ground, and he thinks it can't get any worse, until he sees one of the women, a teenage girl, wake up at the bottom of her grave, and the Parkers continue to fill it in as, half-conscious, the teen struggles against the dirt filling her grave. The words of the waitress that spoke to him in an earlier dream suddenly come back to him, and Sam is filled with revulsion as he realizes what those words really meant. She said "We were buried alive so that we might grow."

Dean digs. He's had enough experience digging up graves that he quickly falls into a rhythm, allowing the familiar push-lift-heave pattern to quell his rising sense of panic. The soil is loose and damp-smelling, easy to shift as long as he's not worried about even edges and precisely squared corners. He's four feet down and just starting to get winded, but his brain won't let him stop, because he's remembering the daisy Sam woke up with two nights ago, and the dirt in Sam's mouth last night, and he's terrified he knows what the next step is.

Daisy Parker is suddenly standing next to Sam as he watches her parents bury one woman after another. She tugs on his arm and he leans over so his face is even with hers. He tries not to notice the worm crawling out of her ear. She puts her mouth up to his ear and whispers ...

In between one shovelful of dirt and the next, the little girl appears next to Dean, sitting at the bottom of the hole he's digging. She leans down to whisper to the ground beneath his feet. He only barely hears the words...

"Wake up."

So Sam wakes up. There's dirt surrounding him and he can't breathe; can barely move. There's something hard and metal digging into his forearm, and he manages to move his arm just enough to grab it.

A hand grabs Dean's shovel from beneath the soil. He's preconditioned from a hundred zombie movies to recoil; from a lifetime of Hunting to look at the soil-encrusted hand rising from the ground as an enemy. Then his brain starts screaming at him, and he grabs the warm, living hand and pulls with all his might.

Something has grabbed Sam's hand; it's pulling at him. For a fraction of a moment he's afraid that it's the murdered Daisies trying to pull him into their graves, and then he realizes that's already happened. He's drowning in loose, damp soil and Dean will never let him live it down if he's killed by a bunch of girls. So he grabs the hand and pulls himself towards it.

Dean pulls at Sam's arm with one hand, frantically, desperately scabbing at the dirt with his other hand, instinct telling him if Sam's hand is here then his head must be over here. He finally feels soft flesh instead of dirt and uncovers a mouth and nose. Sam immediately begins gulping lungfuls of air and spitting out dirt as Dean clears away more and more of the loosely-packed soil from Sam's head.

It's another five minutes of intensive digging before Dean clears enough dirt away so that he and Sam, working in concert, can get enough leverage to pull Sam out of his own grave. They scramble out of the frantically dug hole and collapse, exhausted. And that's when it starts to rain.

Dean starts laughing like it's the funniest thing he's ever seen, Sam eventually joining him, as the hole at their feet slowly fills up with water.

It's still raining the next morning when Sam and Dean stand inside the barn, looking out over the muddy weed-strewn field. They're quiet for the longest time, and then Dean finally speaks up.

"How many do you think are out there?"

"It depends. Did they keep doing it until the end, until last year? That would be over fifty."

"Damn. They killed over fifty women, and no one ever noticed a thing. That's just … wrong."

"Once a year. They chose their victims from all over the northeast. The pattern was too broad for anyone to notice it."

"Why do you think they kept doing it? You know, after it didn't work the first time?"

"Albert Einstein once said 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' The death of their little girl drove the Parkers crazy. It probably felt like the only chance they had of getting their daughter back."

"So why didn't the ghosts go after the Parkers? Or the Carrows?"

"Actually, I think the only ghost here until a few days ago was Daisy Parker. She knew that the other Daisies would gain power as it approached their anniversary with no new sacrifice planned. So Daisy Parker tried to scare people off. The first dream I had was probably the first … call it 'group dream' that the victims were able to manifest."

"Lucky you."

"You know, there's no way that we're going to be able to find all fifty bodies to salt and burn them."

"Okay, so about that, I have an idea …"

"Okay, now I really am scared."

"Funny, Sammy, real funny."

The brothers continue to discuss the Hunt, and what still needs doing, as they walk back to the farmhouse, jogging through the steady rain. From the hayloft, Daisy Parker watches them with her cold, dead eyes, smiling as she sings her favorite song under her breath. The words hang in the air even after she's vanished from sight.

"I'm half crazy, all for the love of you…"

The End

A/N: "Daisy Bell" lyrics by Harry Dacre. Originally published as "Bellis Perennis." Re-posted October 2009 with new title and assorted minor typo fixes.


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